


singing in the present

by ninemoons42



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Modern: No Powers, Character Study, Gen, Introspection, Older Noctis Lucis Caelum
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-27
Updated: 2019-09-27
Packaged: 2020-10-29 05:08:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20791136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: There’s nothing soft in his face anymore; time has been anything and everything to him, with the notable exception of gentle. He sort of regrets what time has done to him, and he sort of regrets what he’s done to himself.





	singing in the present

**Author's Note:**

> Although the bouncy rhythms have nothing to do with the mood of this fic, the title was taken from [this taiko performance](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Z62wWoaKCg).
> 
> I wrote this out of sync with Older Noctis Week -- it's just that it's the first time my birthday took place during a fan-week. Even better, it's a fan-week for a character (or version thereof) whom I love! I did pick up a prompt of my own, here, which is the word/idea of _lace_.
> 
> (Posted 28 Sept in UTC+8!)

It’s the farthest thing from the haze of twilight that he thinks had been wrapped around him, when he finally fell asleep: this sky that’s so vastly clear, he doesn’t think he can catch even a glimpse of daytime stars. And that’s only the first of the faint small ideas trickling syrup-slow into the back of his head, as he rubs his hands over his cheeks, over rising stubble, over the crusts in the corners of his eyes. Sun-warmed drops of light, soft stream, catching on the bits of skin he’s managed to fling out of the sheet-shelter of the bed somehow. The wind that murmurs along with the rustling shift of his pillows, in the shadow-movements that he can see himself making. Flickering even when his eyes are still half-closed, because he’s waking up in colors. He’s waking up and it’s bright out.

Waking up, and for once his experience of it is -- soft. Something almost gentle.

That’s not a gift he can often get, in these lean grinding days, in the hours of -- surprising himself when he passes a mirror. There’s nothing soft in his face anymore; time has been anything and everything to him, with the notable exception of gentle. He sort of regrets what time has done to him, and he sort of regrets what he’s done to himself.

Even if there are days when he sort of doesn’t. 

Gray hairs. Skin stretched drawn and sallow over too many angles, and then laced with lines in all the expected places, too fine, too dense. Worn down, and he knows it, and he’d felt it, in coming to bed, in not being able to remember when he’d come to bed.

He’d sort of thought he’d wake up feeling like he hasn’t rested at all. So what else would’ve been new.

And he’s getting something else entirely, in this here and now, and waking up like this is more than unexpected -- so new it makes the creaking noises coming from his shoulders and wrists sound alarming, even when those sounds are smaller and quieter than expected. Even when his skin is exposed to nothing harmful, nothing like a burning glare.

And he’s torn right down the middle between the good of the now, and the fears of last night -- so torn he almost thinks this might be what the others mean when they say they’re going through it. Only difference is that -- the now is hitting him in a small warmed way, nothing at all like alarming or fearful. 

Just the opposite of those things. Lavender-scented creases in the pillows, and something like distant bird-calls, something like conversations even though he has no hope of learning the language. Do birds gossip, he wonders, vaguely, or do they just get straight to the point, when they’re brushing past each other in takeoff and landing, when they’re perching around the same feeders? Maybe they don’t have time to waste, because they as birds still have so many things to see and do and find, so they only want to talk about the business of everyday life: trees to nest in, cats and dogs to avoid, human-houses that might be kind enough to lend them a little shelter for their nestlings -- 

These aren’t really the kinds of thoughts he’s supposed to be having, even in this unexpected reprieve, and he doesn’t really stop his brain either. Doesn’t feel inclined to do so. He’s learned that he has time to -- be self-indulgent -- but the problem is in getting to the actual chances to be just that.

Which is why he almost laughs when he turns his head and opens his eyes wide again -- in that order -- and the first thing that catches in his blurring sight, that catches him like shadows because there’s such a thing as too much golden light falling through curtains and onto him, is a pair of fluttering wings. Brown streaked in black and gray, nothing remarkable as far as city birds go, colors that would fade and be forgotten next to bright glaring primaries, that would have been all over the place if he’d been waking up in some exotic garden.

That’s clearly very not where he is, he’s nowhere near any of those and thank all the gods that don’t exist for that -- but he’s riveted anyway, to the bird that hops along fearless and reckless, three-quarters of the way to upside-down as it almost dances along the eaves. High sweet chirp of it as it goes, although there’s no real melody to it that he can make out. He almost thinks it’s skimming the edges of this daytime sky. He can just about see the clench of its clawed feet, gripping weathered and rain-stained wood. He can just about imagine the streaks of its passage, the scratches it wears into the material. 

Daredevil-bird, a little wisp of feathers in the colors of a mouse, he thinks. Tiny and roundish and ragged-tailed, and all it’s doing is going about its everyday business. Dart of its beak and he wonders what it’s trying to catch out of the air, what it’s trying to do, and then it’s hopping out of sight and -- he thinks it calls out one more time, flying-away note, before it flits off and he’s entirely here, entirely present and back by himself in this now. Entirely awake in this strange bright hour of a morning.

Which morning is it, anyway? Where is he and whose bed has he woken up in? The linen’s the dead giveaway. He doesn’t stay long enough in his own actual rooms, in the places where he owns the actual keys, to leave or want to leave some kind of scent on the sheets. What for? It’s not like he comes back to those places for more than two nights running. It’s not like he can come back -- there’s always somewhere he needs to be heading off to -- there’s always some kind of metaphorical fire that needs his absolute attention -- there’s no reason for him to wear familiar paths toward familiar doors, towards the promise of the scent of one room or another where he always lays his head.

And yes, he’s aware of the -- thing, that his friends needle him about, endless and kind and deeply sarcastic. Always always well-meaning, which is one half of why he can’t bring himself to tell them to stop. He’s aware of the -- exit, literally speaking, the door out of these problems of his, his wanderer’s nights. He knows he can walk away. He nearly wants to, in the here and now -- maybe he’s been dreaming of it or maybe the birds have made him think of it. Just -- wing away. Walk away. 

Here he is in a bed that smells like a friend. A bed that still retains so much of that friend’s warmth, and that should have been impossible: his friends all wake early, for their varying definitions of early. A bed that still carries the lines of that friend in its creases and in its hollows; and the friend might not be here but they’ve left their presence wrapped around him anyway, in the weight of pillows, in the weight of the fluttering curtains that let in sunlight in rippled beams, in the weight of lavender-scent curled into every breath he takes.

The other half is -- the fact that he has friends at all. The fact that this place exists at all, and that he even has access to it. Someone else’s bed, someone else’s room, someone else’s private spaces. Comfort and the windows thrown open to catch the day and invite it in and keep him company. 

Some days he can’t even remember what it means to be comforted, and there are places like these that remind him, and -- all right, maybe he should go back to being comforted.

Sharp twinge in his throat like half-swallowed regret, that he has to turn away from the windows to do that -- he has to turn away from the sky and its blues. The soft serenity of a cloud in its long ragged white hems passing by, gently trailing off into a luminous gray as it catches the sunlight -- it makes him smile, anyway, as he rolls over and -- breathes, breathes, breathes. Tries to remember what he’s been dreaming of. 

Somewhere along the way another shadow of fluttering wings catches his attention -- makes him look back to the window -- he thinks he’s all right with these larger shapes in dusky blue-brown, with these slender pointed beaks. Newcomers and not intruders, is all -- he’s all right with them, then. 

One of the birds on the sill seems to be looking right in at him, head tilted in a funny way, almost all the way over in a right angle to the rest of its body, to its wings and tail, and he sort of catches himself in the thought of -- is it going to fall over? Is it going to accidentally twist itself out of shape?

He’s not worth that kind of curiosity, is he?

But before that happens -- that same bird ruffles itself into feather-edges and the pretty flutter of its wing-feathers splayed out, before pulling itself back in, before settling again -- 

He sits up straight when that bird that’s no more than the size of his fist all told throws a single melodic note out into the world -- a clarion call, it seems, because in the next moment, in the next rush of feather-flight, it’s not alone. It’s got companions, suddenly: larger ones and smaller ones and the one near the end of the line in its odd pale-gray coloration, sticking out from among its companions like a sore thumb -- and they shake and go still in a long rapid sequence, wave of rippling settling that he almost wishes he could have captured in a more permanent form. Take a picture on his phone that is somewhere in this room, but then again he doesn’t know how to catch their movement in a still image, so it will have to be some kind of short video. The birds move so swiftly, in only a few seconds, if at that.

He’s not entirely sure they can do something like this, anyway, the more so in response to an animal that clearly isn’t them, that is clearly on the other side of a wall from them -- what else can he think when the first bird never quite takes its eyes off of him, all throughout -- like it’s watching him, like it’s just waiting for him to move and it’ll guard all the rest, it’ll warn all of them about him -- 

The morning in its drenched light, the thin wisping clouds in their wind-flow through the sky, the empty branches of the tree across the street, the knotted messes of power transmission lines strung from towering poles. The room in its scents, the sheets pooled around him and curled around him, the pillows slumped around him in scattered heaps.

All of these things fall away from him when instead of startling away, instead of flocking away when he taps his fingertips against the window, the birds do something else entirely.

The guardian-bird, the one that’s been watching him, shakes its head in a funny wobbling arc -- and then it begins to sing.

And, like a trickle into a river, like a spatter into a snowfall, the others follow suit.

He swallows and to himself the sound is far too loud, creates far too much echo, inside the spaces of his head, inside his bones -- enough to almost drown out the song for that brief moment -- 

Impossible for the birds to all sing the same song. He understands that much at least. There’s some kind of -- rising tide to all of them, is the thing that he gets, first. They’re not all singing in the exact same registers, but he can get the overlapping tones and ranges, and then after that there are -- hiccups, little chaotic pauses.

It’s the strangest choir he’s ever had to listen to and he listens to a few more minutes of their singing, the pleasantly disjointed thought of all of their voices in a jangling blend, and he has the oddest thought that -- he might be listening to some kind of lace, only it’s in voices and not in thread. The tattered song-fragments running together, the harmony and the clash -- bird-hearts, bird-breaths, lifting into the sweet lilting notes or falling into noise -- 

He could be snared on this, he thinks, he should probably find some way of recording this so he’ll always be caught in the little voices, in the little songs -- 

Pinned, though, he’s pinned where he’s half-sitting up on the bed, and his gaze keeps wandering away from the feathers and from the chorus, the pauses for air -- he can’t look at the birds for the wonder that clamors in his chest, the emotions lodged beneath his heart -- but the song, it’s the song that he can’t turn away from, it’s wrapped around him and the birds sing sharp edges into him, and for every single one of them he’s grateful --

**Author's Note:**

> Come talk to me on Tumblr at my FFXV sideblog [@ninemoons42-lestallumhaven](http://ninemoons42-lestallumhaven.tumblr.com/) or at my main [@ninemoons42](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/) \-- or, hey, if Tumblr becomes too rotten and we can't talk there any more, there's always Twitter, where I am @ninemoons42.


End file.
